Alberty's Blah Blah Blog

Sorry for missing yet another posting.

Last night was a late one. This is the week that Six Characters in Search of an Author opens and most of the actors, I think, feel that we’re a bit behind the eight-ball, as it were. We open on Friday and have been missing at least one actor for the last three nights. Tuesday night one of main characters, The Step-Daughter, started vomiting half way through the second act. But the troupe is filled with goers and we pressed on and finished the run-thru.

Last night The Son, was home with a fever and vomiting.

Therefore, I went for a walk this morning with my boy. Just a head clearer, you know. Honestly, I forgot how much I like walks, especially with him.

Today was the perfect day for it too: Autumn, crisp, sunny. There is a deep warmth with a superficial layer of cool breeze. It is football weather.

And there are smells that I forgot as well. There is a sort of moist loam undercurrent coming up from the leaves. We walked through several blasts of dryer softener smell.

There was also one magical moment, straight out of the movie Excalibur. We turned one of the lazy corners around one of the old gargantuan houses and were met with a seemingly unending shower of saffron colored pine needles swirling in an odd updraft. I have no recollection of seeing such a thing before.

I need to remember to take more walks. I don’t know why I seem to eschew them. They are refreshing and soulfully reinvigorating. I just get caught up in my lists of things to get done or my need to just lay down for a moment. But the walking subverts the need to lay down. And it gets us outside.

For some reason, I’m suddenly feeling a bit like Jack Handey. I think it’s time to stop writing.

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My name is Jason and I am addicted to Pocket Frogs.

This is not a paid endorsement nor is it a public service announcement. It is simply a confession.

From time to time I become mildly addicted (I like to think “mildly”) to a game. Sometimes on my computer, rarely on the Wii, but often on my iPod. I have been through the Civilizations and Maddens, the Call of Duties and the Doodlejumps. And now I am enamored of the Pocket Frogs.

I’m not really sure why I like it so much — perhaps because it is so pretty. The colors are incredible.

The play is pretty simple. You breed frogs to create rarer, more expensive frogs. You an purchase more habitats and fill them with flora and kitsch to make your frogs happier. You jump around in lily ponds and eat flies. You sell your frogs and trade your frogs and gift your frogs, if you have friends who play.

There is really nothing competitive for me here, which I have slowly begun to realize is one of the things that will bring me to a game. Strange, I know. But my joy in games lies not in the conquest of someone. It especially doesn’t lie in the discovery of the game controls or the mastery of specific moves. It lies in the almost meditative anesthesia of another world: colors, sounds, easy discovery of the new.

You see, I think too much, about too much, about things over which I usually have little control. I know this does not come as a surprise to those of you who know me, but there it is.

It takes me forever to get to sleep. My mind simply seems incapable of easy relaxation. If I awake in the middle of the night which, considering my 15 month old, is frequent, it takes me considerable time to get back to sleep. If I am up with him for an hour, I have another half hour to an hour before I am back asleep. And to add to the humor of it, I have been given the trait of sleeping light.

Often I am reading several books, one of which becomes my bedtime book. And often that works quite well for the dozing compound I need. My present book, however, is Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman. It is not a good book to sleep by. It just gets me angry and sad, which is not conducive to sleep.

So I have taken to pre-slumber frog breeding. And it has strangely worked.

So I am addicted to what I am calling its healing, calming properties.

Oop. Feeling stressed. Where’s my iPod?

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Today is one of my favorite days. It is the opening day of the Chili/Crock-pot Season. It’s not a set day more than it is a feeling. There is football in the air, our sugar maple is darkening, and I’ve performed at least one raking.

Chili is my king-comfort food. It nearly always makes me happy.

Now, I know there are chili purists out there. I know that for you chili does not have beans. But for me, chili is all about the beans. Sacrilege!

Even more sacrilege, the recipe for today has no meat in it.

I know, I know, sorry. But the wife and I are trying to cut down on our meat intake. And seriously, my enjoyment of chili is the flavor, not the meat. But I sure do love the beans.

My Chili Bean Stew

2 tbs oil

2 tbs butter/margarine

4 large onions roughly chopped

2 jalapenos

1 green pepper chopped

2 cloves garlic crushed and minced

2 cans fire-roasted tomatoes

1 can tomato sauce

2 cans black beans with juice

2 cans pintos

2 cans kidney beans

1 tbs chili powder

1 tbs ancho chili powder

1 tbs cumin powder

salt and pepper to taste

2-4 tbs white vinegar

some shakes of Cholula, my favorite hot sauce.

Warm skillet over medium-low heat with 2tbs oil and 2tbs butter/margarine. Cook onions until translucent then add sliced jalapenos and green pepper. Continue until onions are caramelized. Toss in garlic and let it heat up a bit.

While the onion mixture is caramelizing throw everything else into your crock-pot and set it on low. I might reserve a couple of tbs of the vinegar and the Cholula until it’s nearly done. I like to add two tbs of vinegar at the top of cooking and then a couple more closer to the end.

Once the onion mixture has fully caramelized, add it to the pot. Let this thing bubble for five to eight hours. It’s all cooked, so all you really need to do is heat it up, but the longer you go the more complex it gets.

Once it’s done, you can, of course eat it as it, but, whoa Nelly, just add a few things and it really perks up. I love this with a big ol’ dollop of garlic chevre, or some sour cream. It’s also great a dip for some chips when you add some cheddar cheese.

Or, my all time fave, add it to some Mac & Cheese. That is comfort.

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Please read the following insert from a 1941 Time Magazine article.

I have really tried to not post any political crap on this blog, because, quite frankly, I hate politics. It is nothing but a divisive shit-slinging business. Most of our politicians care as much for the American people as they do a dead skunk in the road. It is filled with hypocrisy and dishonesty, self-serving sycophants, and disingenuous self-promoters. And the few who are in for the betterment of society are either crushed or become a lone “kook” voice in the darkness.

Our congress can’t get together to do the right things for our society. I mean they vote no on a health care bill for 9/11 responders, because it would raise taxes by closing a loophole on “…foreign multinational corporations incorporated in tax haven countries from avoiding tax on income earned in the U.S.” If you just skimmed over that last line, please read it carefully. They voted it down because it would “embarrass them in an election year.”

Did it make sense?

It probably didn’t make sense to the firefighters, cops, and rescue workers who are suffering illness in direct relation to their work at the World Trade Centers site either.

Especially when they passed this bill: “Protecting Gun Owners in Bankruptcy Act” which will “ensure that families can keep these prized possessions and continue to pass them on for generations to come.” That bill was passed in the same week that they voted down the 9/11 Responder Health Care Act.

It makes me sick.

The reason I began this post with the insert from Time Magazine is that we may look at that thing with ridiculous statements like, “Most Chinese avoid horn-rimmed spectacles,” and think how horrible and racist it is — how we would never print anything like that today.

You know what? We do. We are just better at nuancing our racism. We couch it in righteous indignation that a Muslim cleric would have the temerity to build a Muslim community center two blocks away from the hallowed ground of the World Trade Center, but not give a shit that there is a strip club, a lingerie store, and a betting parlor closer to the “hallowed ground.”

We couch it in our America for Americans rhetoric while stepping on the rights and freedom of Native Americans who we slaughtered on a genocidal scale to steal their land.

We barely couch it in the desire to see our rightfully elected president’s birth certificate, then denounce the Hawaii certificate as a conspiracy, but not be bothered by the white candidate’s overseas birth in the Panama Canal Zone.

I know what some of you may be thinking at this point, so let me be clear. I don’t care if you are a Democrat or a Republican or an Independent. If you are advocating fear, if you are riling the baser instincts of our nature for your personal gain, don’t you feel any shame in that? I actually pity you, little good does it do me.

Because the people in power are in power because of the money, because of their ability to work fear for their advantage.

I used to believe, and not too long ago, that hope could always defeat fear. But looking at history, and now looking at the present, I’m not so sure any more.

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I spent my first two years of college at Emerson College, a small liberal arts college, a little larger than my high school, just off the Charles River in Boston. I loved it.

The dorm I lived in was called Charlesgate East. It was supposed to be one of the top ten most haunted buildings in the city. Cramming it with a couple of hundred of artsy, creative, melodramatic college kids did not help that reputation.

My two roommates were Bill, a laid-back, über-cool all black-wearing hipster from Lowell who brought with him the first CD player I ever saw (yes I’m that old), and Matt, a pasty mouth-breathing, analytic, anti-social son of an upstate New York funeral director who brought his paid-mourner suit with him. And of course there was I, a naïve, overweight, pink, suggestible, hyper-creative Iowan [they really did ask me if I owned cows and grew corn, even though I came from a city larger than most of their home towns].

We could have been a sit-com.

Where was I going?

Within the first couple of weeks a cop was shot underneath our dorm window.

That’s not where I was going.

Oh, yeah, the building. The building was creepy in a way that things are creepy in the movies. There were arches in the foyer leading to various rooms and halls on the first floor. Around these arches were small faces, about the size of my fist, maybe a little smaller. And the features were deeply carved, so that you could stick a finger well into the mouths of some faces. And most of them were not happy faces. Gaping mouths and pained eyes arched above you as you walked to the elevator that could hold no more than seven. The only elevator, mind you, for a seven story building that housed several hundred students.

There was another elevator that had no working parts in it. It was boarded up and could, from time to time, be heard running, none-the-less. It was apparently haunted by several ghosts: one a couple — mobster and moll — who were gunned down in a mort d’affaire, and a Boston University student who plunged to his/her death in the empty shaft.

There was a back stairwell that knee-tremblingly creepy that few people took. There was a small stairwell that snaked around the small working elevator. And there was a grand staircase that few people took at night.

There was a little girl who would sit on the second floor landing of the grand staircase in the middle of the night. If you walked up the staircase and saw her, she would ask if you would be her friend and follow you up a flight before disappearing — especially if you were drunk, if you know what I mean.

Was the building haunted? I honestly don’t know. I do know that some supremely creepy things occurred in my presence in that building, things I have not dealt with since.

And I will come back to those things in a following post.

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I’m going to write about goats.

I don’t know much about goats, and, honestly, they kind of creep me out.

My first real experience with goats occurred when I was hiking the West Highland Way from Glasgow to Inverness. I don’t remember exactly where it was, perhaps Inverarnan; we had set down on this little hillock perch above a thin bank upon a river. The midges were horrific. We had to eat with our food inside our mosquito hoods.

Anyway, as we were eating our mini-fly infested mac&cheese, these three feral goats came trotting through camp. Honestly, they were terrifying. Let me clarify by typing perhaps the most ridiculous thing I have typed in my life: These goats were terrifying. It was all I could do to stand my ground and not mess myself.

I turned to one of my hiking compatriots and opined, “No wonder some culture think the devil is a goat.”

I mean these things were rangy, big, scruffy, black and gray, with funky wavy scimitar horns, and eyes that made you wonder why people just don’t kill it with fire. And the smell — it made me vomit in my mouth a little. Did I mention the eyes. Bejeebus! Just thinking of them gives me the willies. Did I mention that they were big?

Okay, the second experience was on this farm, somewhere around here. I’m not good with places. Anyway, they had these fainting goats, and some of them were jumpers. It was all good clean fun until I got close enough to see those eyes. I had a flashback and the day ended on a down note.

Side-note-leading-to-a-cogent-point: The same friends that I hiked Scotland with also like to remind me that we can make cheese from any mammal. They were especially interested in human cheese from a nursing mother, but sort of glommed onto the idea that we could actually make cheese from a Chihuahua — imagine here someone miming milking a Chihuahua with their thumbs and index fingers. Imagine my eventually stunted joy at finding Chihuahua cheese at local mongers.

Supernumerary-side-note-leading-to-a-non-cogent-point: for a time I had a problem with this concept (that it was icky, not that I couldn’t understand it) and they kept harping on the mammalian cheese thing. Until one day my friend mentioned that he liked the smell of scat: animal poo. I mentioned that, “didn’t the smell come from little particles of the poo entering your body through the nose, ultimately lodging in your lungs?” From that point I followed his mention of mammal cheese with my poo-nose-particle and we sort of reached a détente.

None-the-less: if those friends were to show me a photo of a Madagascan Aye-Aye and hand me a plate of luscious Aye-Aye cheese, I would be loath to touch it, much less consume it.

So why is it that I have relatively little problem eating, what I have since come to refer to as, Cheese of the Beast, Curd of the Dark One, Baphomet’s Brie? I like goat cheese. Some of it I really truly dig.

I much prefer goat feta to cow feta. I’m really digging on this Trader Joe’s Goat Gouda with Potato. Not a huge fan of the chèvre, but I got soft spot for the harder goat cheeses. There was this ash-veined cheese I procured from The Gateway Market in Des Moines that feet-stinking delicious.

And yet I find these animals utterly loathsome. I don’t know if this is some unnatural disconnect, or what. I mean, I’m not a big oyster fan: chewy salty snot bag in shell, not for me. Not all that keen on urchin roe. I mean, Bourdain and Zimmern, I am not.

But this Edam of the Damned-One is a pretty tasty thing.

I don’t know. I’ve tried oysters and urchin roe, even though they ain’t pretty. I guess if someone sent it to me I’d give the Aye-Aye a try-try.

After all, my wife married me and the packaging isn’t so hot. But I do have a soft and gooey center filled with yummy goodness. Is there something greater to learn from this understanding, or am I just talking out of my Asiago?

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Whenever I cook bacon I think of my paternal grandfather. He was part French (my great grandmother) and part Cherokee (my great grandfather). He was sort of my proto-man. He lived in a bit of a ramshackle house in a tiny town in Oklahoma. The house smelled of bacon and cigarettes, dogs and sweat. He was gruff and simple.

My maternal grandfather was tall and thin and always wore fedoras over his balding head. He looked like Bing Crosby. During the Second World War he was a sailor on Kodiak in the Aleutian Islands, trading ice cream for black bread with the Russians. Later in life he worked for Weyerhaeuser and could look at an acre or two of Arkansas pines and predict with alacrity and spooky precision the amount of lumber-feet available from that site. His time in the war got him addicted to vanilla ice cream, every night before bed from the war to his death. His name was Aubrey, but most everyone called him Dean. We called him Grandfather.

My paternal grandfather was short and square and had leathery brick-colored skin with a shock of unruly white hair. He looked like Bill Mauldin’s soldier, Willie. During the Second World War he fought in Europe and the Philippines, and for a year after sat on the hood of his Ford truck with a shotgun at night instead of sleeping. Later in life he worked as a driller and toolpusher for Phillips Petroleum and could snap the head off a rattlesnake by using it like a whip. His time in the war got him addicted to silence and Camels, even when he had to turn off the oxygen tank to do so. His name was Alan, but most everyone called him Al. We called him Dadad.

Grandfather would assess a man like he was assessing lumber. And a man was white. A better man was one with a Masonic ring.

Dadad would assess a man by his ability to fish and make him laugh. A better man was one who could make a joke with a fish-hook through his thumb.

Of course, I loved them both. Grandfather, however died when I was younger, perhaps too young to fully appreciate him. Dadad died much later. And he gave us much better stories.

One time we were coming back from a catfish bank after fishing for most of the day. He was barefoot, as usual, and he was leading the way through the knee-height dry grass. He stopped for a moment and started swishing his foot around in the grass beside him, looking inquisitively, but dispassionately down. He reached his hand back toward my father and said “Give me that hogleg, sprout.” The hogleg was my father’s .357 Magnum that he kept in a side holster on our trips to his old hometown. Sprout was what Dadad always called him. My grandfather took the gun and swished around in the grass with his foot again, took careful aim at something, and let go with a tremendous explosion from the gun. The kickback barely moved his hand.

He actually tossed the loaded, non-safetied gun back toward my father and took off again toward his truck. My dad and I walked forward a bit and looked down into the wavering grass. In it was a headless snake writhing and curling in on itself in its death throes. My dad shook his head knowingly and mumbled, “Copperhead.”

That’s the sort of thing he did. He was sort of mythic, and his taciturn mien made that mythos even greater for me. He was definitely a god of my youth, and the farther away I get from him, the more mythic he seems.

My Father’s Father

You were my distant Doric column

supporting my child sky

in made memories of family tales

You were

my Forever Man

scented bacon

sweat and cigarettes

and oil

every day

of oil you drew from the earth

I saw, through eyes and thoughts of others,

you

standing Hercules

arms extended

feat of strength

with my young parent lovers

swinging from your branches

as from an oak

a fabled tree

You were

my Forever Man

vibrant, gruff

spirit of your Cherokee father

earth and loam

I loved to read

your bronzed warrior skin

laced with webs

like Sanskrit

speaks of wars and rivers

soldier nightmares

sun and things you never could reveal

You were

my Forever Man

story weaver

hunter, fisher

wolf in woodsman skin

So much my Forever Man

I can

not bear

to

see your weath-

ered face now

laced with

waste and sad-

ness quiet

acquiesc-

ence

breath-

ing from

the cart-

rolled cani-

ster

waiting

waiting

for the end

You used to

wait for

no one

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Sorry about missing the post last Friday. It was a good and a bad day.

I’m going to write about the bad.

I remember when we decided to get Fenway, our second dog. We felt that our only dog, Wrigley, could use a companion. She was pretty high strung. My wife’s long illness did not help in that, either. She had become more skittish and was starting to really concern us. So we decided to find another dog.

We were back in Des Moines visiting our parents and someone had suggested that we go the Animal Rescue League branch in, of all places, Southridge Mall. We saw a couple of dogs that really didn’t’ do anything for us.

Then there he was, this meek, medium-sized, black, long-haired and beautiful dog with a white patch on his chest and toe length white socks. He nosed around the edges of the large brightly colored pen. My wife and I sat down, I think. He eventually came over and nosed around my feet.

“His name is Max,” said the lady who was showing him. “He lived with an elderly lady who simply could not take care of him. And he’s fully house-trained.”

I’m not sure if he started peeing on my shoes before she finished that last statement, or just after. But it was an oddly endearing moment for us.

“Will he get any larger?” I asked.

“Oh, no,” said he kindly lady. “He’s done growing”

“Does he shed?” asked my wife.

“Oh, not much,” said the kindly lady again. “Just a normal shedder, you know.”

The kindly lady lied.

He became a huge high-volume shedder. But he’s probably the best dog I have ever had.

His main problem is that he eats everything. By everything I mean grass, kick ass blueberry muffins, panties, and finally a small stuffed monkey with magnets in its hands and feet.

This offending simian lodged in his small intestines causing a blockage that had him vomiting for three full days.

The vet had to remove three and a half feet of his intestines. There were some other complications.

But he’s back home. And it’s killing us. Emotionally.

He’s not eating. He can barely get up, like his back legs just aren’t doing what he wants them to do. He vomited a couple of times. And he has to wear one of those ridiculous cone collars.

My son loves to climb on him and lay on him. But that can’t happen.

I don’t’ know where this is going. I of course mean this both as a piece of writing and a piece of the future.

Fenway has only eaten about five small pieces of chicken since he came home Friday. He goes back to the vet today. So, I guess like most things, we just have to wait and see.

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